Building a More Efficient Contact Center

You need a contact center designed for your customers.

But that can be much easier said than done. If you are looking to revamp your contact center and deliver better customer experiences, it may be difficult to know where to begin. Revamping your contact center (or building one from scratch) can be daunting and as a result, many organizations simply never undertake such a project. But in the end, that approach hurts your customers and in the end, your bottom line.

Not to worry: we are here to help. Take a look at some of the ways modern contact center solutions can help improve efficiency and productivity in your contact center:

1. Give Customers Their Choice of Channels

A recent study of customer service preferences indicated that less than half (41%) of U.S. consumers will pick up the phone when needing help while an additional 47% indicated they will also use web chat, email and other online outlets. If your contact center doesn’t support multiple communication channels, you could be missing out on opportunities to engage with customers. Offering a multi-channel experience is now part-and-parcel of creating top-notch customer experiences. Your company can either accept and embrace this trend or lose ground to competitors that do.

2. Start Measuring More Than Basic Metrics

If you’re still relying solely on standard KPIs like average wait time, average call time and call resolution percentage, you’re only seeing a small piece of the contact center puzzle. When it comes to traditional measures, factor in the impact they’re having on customer satisfaction, call resolution, customer loyalty and sales opportunities. To create a better customer experience, you need detailed information about how and why agents excel or struggle. Use these types of advanced call metrics to uncover the source of customer frustrations and minimize them by making appropriate changes to how your technology is structured or agents are trained.

3. Stay Proactive

Staying proactive is key to delivering an exceptional customer experience. Make sure your contact center solution is flexible and delivers monitoring tools such as real-time dashboards so you can prevent spikes in call volumes and identify issues before they arise. Utilize custom IVR greetings so you can alert callers of the issue and route them to a designated queue. This will eliminate transfers and free up your queues to alleviate common customer frustrations.

4. Consolidate Your Agents' Workspace

Integration with your CRM, ERP and other technology solutions is a must these days. Modern solutions deliver APIs and native integrations, making it easy to create a single workspace for your agents. If your agents are required to juggle multiple systems, determine which solutions could be consolidated to provide a single source of information. Integrated features not only save time and provide you with a consolidated view of your operations, but also provide better data integrity and allow for a more personalized customer experience since the agent has customer history immediately at hand.

Want to talk about how you can modernize your contact center? Feel free to reach out!